In her eighth novel Hamnet , Maggie O'Farrell imagines the short life and tragic death of Shakespeare's only son, aged 11, in 1596. Although it is not known how Hamnet died, O'Farrell attributes his death to the plague. She creates a visceral and affecting portrait of his swift decline and the powerlessness of those around him, particularly his mother, to save him.
Authors
- Kate Flaherty
Senior Lecturer (English and Drama), Australian National University
- Amy Walters
PhD candidate, English Literature, Australian National University
A critical and commercial success, the novel's popularity was aided by its connection with Shakespeare, whose enduring reputation as a literary genius ensures that, as the scholar John Sutherland once asserted , "where there's a Will there's a payday".
The death of Hamnet is one creative trigger for this bestselling novel, but is it the main source? And was Hamnet's death really the source for Shakespeare's Hamlet? With the film adaptation , co-authored by O'Farrell and director Chloé Zhao, arriving in Australian cinemas this month, it is timely to consider the broader influences on O'Farrell's novel and Shakespeare's play.
The inspirations are not singular in either case. Shakespeare was influenced by clear creative precursors, while O'Farrell's depiction of maternal grief is haunted by her personal experience.
A rescued wife?
O'Farrell has repeatedly stated in interviews that she had two motivations for writing Hamnet: to "rescue" Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway from negative representations in biographies of Shakespeare , and to "correct" what she perceives as the lack of acknowledgement of the significance of Hamnet's death to Shakespeare's art.
Her former concern manifests in her representation of Anne as a quietly wilful character, who engineers her husband's escape from his overbearing father in Stratford to London, where his career can take flight. The novel's third-person narrative is increasingly filtered through Anne's perspective as the story progresses, placing her grief centre stage.
In a pointed intervention, O'Farrell names her "Agnes". This is the name she is given in her father Richard Hathaway's will, though the assertion that Agnes is her "true" name is problematic, due to a lack of other documentary sources and because spelling was variable at the time.
Renaming Anne is indicative of O'Farrell's desire to offer a fresh vision, but this in itself is not a new project. Carol Anne Duffy's poem Anne Hathaway (1999) and Germaine Greer's speculative biography Shakespeare's Wife (2007) are two of many earlier revisionist treatments. Katherine West Schiel's Imagining Shakespeare's Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway (2018) tracks the long history of this inventive impulse.
O'Farrell explicitly encourages readers to connect Hamnet and Hamlet through two historical notes at the front of the book. The first informs us that Hamlet was staged only four years after Hamnet's death; the second cites Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt's claim that Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable names in Stratford in the period.
These selective facts serve O'Farrell's fiction well. But the view that Hamlet memorialises Hamnet is, as scholar James Shapiro argues , a myth. While the novel's promise to deliver the "backstage" story of the creation of Hamlet is alluring, its imputation that Hamnet's death was the primary inspiration for the writing of the play is countered by the historical evidence and the play itself.
Does Shakespeare's son haunt Hamlet?
The opening of Hamnet echoes that of Hamlet. In the novel's first scene, Hamnet explores an empty house. O'Farrell gives him an exquisitely physical existence: he jumps from the third step and hurts his knees, he notices the orange embers and spiralling smoke in the fireplace. He calls out, "Where is everyone?"
His reality is unstable, palpable and yet spectral, as though he were already dead. This impression is advanced when he spooks his grandfather, whose sight is ailing:
"Who's there?" he cries. "Who is that?"
"It's me."
"Who?"
"Me." Hamnet steps towards the narrow shaft of light slanting through the window. "Hamnet."
The beginning of Shakespeare's Hamlet is similarly disorienting:
BARNARDO: Who's there?
FRANCISCO: Nay answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.
We taste the fearful vigilance of the guards on the battlements of Elsinore castle. About eighteen lines later, we find out why everyone is so jumpy. The newly arrived guard asks: "What, has this thing appeared again tonight?"
As in O'Farrell's novel, we enter a destabilised reality, in which physical sensation, here the "bitter cold", amplifies the existential dread caused, in this case, by the repeated appearance of a ghost.
The biographical connection between Hamnet and Hamlet is clinched in the novel's closing scene through Agnes's response to a performance of Hamlet. Seeing her husband acting on stage as the ghost of Hamlet's father (who is also named Hamlet), Agnes believes that Shakespeare
in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son […] he has put himself in death's clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place.
As he exits, the ghost - Shakespeare - turns toward Agnes and "speaks his final words: 'Remember me'."
These words provide a poetic resolution for O'Farrell's novel, but they are only the beginning of the tragedy for Hamlet. Readers familiar with the play may find it amusing that Agnes's interest in the character bearing her dead son's name evaporates before the end of Act I.
Grief is certainly a shared thread between the two stories, but if we take the drama on its own terms, "remember me", as spoken by the Ghost, is unlikely to work as a salve for Agnes's grief. In fact, as the next four acts bear out, the course of Hamlet's grief for his father's death is tortured. What torments him and results in many deaths, including his own, is not the loss of a beloved father, but regicidal corruption in the state and a personal commission to revenge "a foul and most unnatural murder".
"Remember me" burdens Hamlet rather than frees him, making the play an ill-fitting memorial for Shakespeare's lost son. By contrast, consider Constance's lament in King John :
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
When Shakespeare wanted to portray the grief of a parent for a lost child, he knew how.
Hamlet is unlikely to have been a tribute to little Hamnet, but there are several imaginative sources. Hamlet bears more resemblance to the 12th-century Danish legend of Amleth than it does to Shakespeare's life: a king is murdered by his brother, who subsequently marries the king's wife; the son acts mad to protect himself from his uncle; an eavesdropper is killed; Amleth berates his mother Gerutha.
But there were even more immediate creative precursors. A play, now lost, called Hamlet is recorded in the diary of the theatre manager Philip Henslowe as being performed in London in 1594, at least five years before Shakespeare's. What if, rather than pouring out his heart's grief over his son, Shakespeare was adapting a recent hit?
In addition, Shakespeare was cashing in on the popularity of a play by Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (1592), in which a father revenges the murder of his son, Horatio, using a play to do so.
Reading Hamlet through the prism of biographical speculation impoverishes our understanding of the play and its relationship with stories in circulation during the Renaissance period. Shakespeare used matter other than his own experience as creative springboards for his imagination - just as O'Farrell, in crafting Hamnet, borrows some material from Shakespeare's life and work, and much from her own.
A well of maternal grief
Reading Hamnet primarily in relation to Anne Hathaway, or Shakespeare, or his play Hamlet, is limiting. On the other hand, O'Farrell's biography yields some illuminating links with her novel's depiction of maternal grief.
In her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am (2017), O'Farrell writes about her experiences of pregnancy loss and her powerlessness in the face of her elder daughter's life-threatening medical condition. In the mid-2000s, following the traumatic birth of her first child, a son, O'Farrell experienced multiple miscarriages.
She eventually conceived a daughter through IVF. This daughter lives with an immunological disorder, which leaves her vulnerable to ordinary illnesses, such as the common cold, and prone to anaphylaxis triggered by exposure to a variety of everyday substances. Consequently, O'Farrell and her family live "in a state of high alert".
O'Farrell describes how the lack of vocabulary and rituals around miscarriage compounded her grief. She laments that children lost before they are born are "so invisible, so evanescent" that "our language doesn't even have a word for them". She also admonishes the "school of thought […] that expects women to get over a miscarriage as if nothing has happened, to metabolise it quickly and get on with life".
In Hamnet, the absent presence of lost children is vividly portrayed. The novel evokes a matrix of loss that goes beyond Hamnet's death. It references Shakespeare's siblings who died in childhood, including his sisters Anne and the renamed "Eliza" (Joan). In the novel, one of Shakespeare's surviving sisters is also called Eliza, a living memorial to her dead sibling.
In her own life, O'Farrell has been deprived of the opportunity to name and mourn, but she has meticulously populated Hamnet with lost children who continue to demand the attention of the living.
In O'Farrell's memoir, death stalks the child who has lived when many before her did not. O'Farrell and her family must be always prepared for her daughter's anaphylaxis. They must never leave the house without an emergency kit; they must weigh up the risks posed by a simple walk in the park or a play date. Then, when the world strikes, "you are reduced to a crystalline point, to a single purpose: to keep your child alive, to ensnare her in the world of the living, to hang on to her and never let her go".
O'Farrell describes an attack in disturbing detail: hives leads to swelling of the airways, which, without emergency treatment, can be followed by cardiac arrest. Meanwhile, the victim is "clawing at their throat, hoarse with panic and fear," and feels cold to the touch as their blood pressure drops.
There is more than a shade of this terror in the novel's descriptions of Hamnet's decline. As the fever takes hold, he is transported to a snowy landscape "he doesn't recognise", which tempts him to "surrender himself, to stretch out in this glistening, thick white blanket: what relief it would give him".
One cannot fail to think of O'Farrell's efforts to keep her daughter alive as Agnes watches Hamnet in his death throes, pleading with him not to go.
As a beautifully affecting portrait of grief, Hamnet achieves what Hamlet never set out to do: it inscribes the memory of children taken too soon and testifies to the necessity of mourning and remembrance. As readers, playgoers or film fans, it makes for a richer experience to weigh each work by its own merits, because it takes many different kinds of ghosts to make a story.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
